As Camelot Began: The Unseen Portraits of the Kennedys by Richard Avedon

When President-Elect John F. Kennedy and his family posed for Avedon in January 1961, it sent a message of youth, vitality, and confidence. As a new book by Shannon Thomas Perich chronicles the session, biographer Robert Dallek, in this exclusive assessment for Vanity Fair, gives the historical backdrop to the photos, many of which appear for the first time. To see the Avedon portraits, pick up the November issue.

John F. Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 in the morning on November 9, 1960, uncertain whether he had defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency. He thought he had won, but six states hung in the balance, and after months of exhaustive campaigning he was too tired to stay awake any longer. When he rose, at around 9:30, Ted Sorensen, his Senate aide and speechwriter, gave him the result. Five of the six states had fallen into his column, and Kennedy had gained the prize by the smallest margin in the popular vote since Grover Cleveland won the presidency in 1884.

The narrowness of the margin weighed heavily on Kennedy. "How did I manage to beat a guy like this by only a hundred thousand votes?" he asked Kenny O'Donnell, a member of his Massachusetts inner circle. Henry Brandon, the British journalist, thought the result had "hurt his self-­confidence and pride."

Later that morning, Kennedy held a press conference at the Hyannis Port Armory, on Cape Cod, where his family had a residence and he had spent Election Night. According to one observer, Kennedy's hands trembled as he spoke to the newsmen. Fatigue, nervousness, or medication may have produced the tremors, but it wasn't the first time this had happened. Films at the Kennedy library reveal other instances, and suggest that the variety of ailments Kennedy had struggled with for a long time—spastic colitis, osteoporosis, prostatitis, urethritis, and Addison's disease (a malfunction of the adrenal gland)—may have been the principal contributing factor.

Sorensen recalls that, as late as two weeks after the election, he felt Kennedy had still not recovered from the strains of the campaign. His mind was neither "keen" nor "clear," and he seemed "reluctant to face up to the details of personnel and program selection." Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the president-elect's father, had a similar impression. On one occasion Jack complained to him, "Jesus Christ, this one wants that, that one wants this. Goddamn it, you can't satisfy any of these people. I don't know what I'm going to do about it all." Joe responded, "Jack, if you don't want the job, you don't have to take it. They're still counting votes up in Cook County."

Kennedy was eager to become president, however wrenching the physical and psychological adjustments. He had 72 days between the election results, on November 9, and the inauguration, on January 20, to complete the transition, and he understood fully that he had to project himself to the world as a self-assured and capable chief executive—a commanding presence. Stirring rhetoric would not be enough. To be sure, Kennedy did not discount the importance of words in rallying the nation to meet its foreign and domestic challenges. Winston Churchill's powerful exhortations during World War II set a standard he had long admired. Kennedy was hardly unmindful of how important a great inaugural address could be. He asked Sorensen to gather suggestions from a variety of people, and to make the address as brief as possible. "I don't want people to think I'm a windbag," he said.

But Kennedy intuitively grasped that communicating with the nation visually would be as important as anything he might say. His first televised debate with Richard Nixon had confirmed the importance of physical appearance in a new media age. People who heard the debate on the radio believed that Nixon had bested Kennedy, but, for TV viewers, it was the other way around. Given the well-founded rumors about his health, Kennedy was determined to reassure everyone that he enjoyed the vitality you'd expect from the youngest man (at age 43) ever elected to the White House. It wasn't necessarily going to be easy. Because the steroids he took to control his Addison's disease made him look puffy and overweight, Kennedy was reluctant to take his pills. His secretary Evelyn Lincoln later recalled that, four days before his inauguration, Kennedy said after looking in the mirror, "My God, look at that fat face, if I don't lose five pounds this week we might have to call off the Inauguration."

Little wonder, then, that the Kennedys seized upon a request from Richard Avedon, America's most distinguished photo portraitist and fashion photographer, to capture the president-elect and his family—his wife, Jacqueline; their three-year-old daughter, Caroline; and their infant son, John junior—in the weeks before he took the oath of office. Jackie Kennedy was already well known for her astute fashion sense, and Avedon had photographed her before.

Using a president's family to promote positive images of the country's chief executive was not unprecedented. Theodore Roosevelt had drawn public attention to his attractive family in order to create a bond with ordinary Americans. Eleanor Roosevelt had successfully broached the idea that a First Lady could be nearly as much a public figure as her husband. But neither Bess Truman nor Mamie Eisenhower had followed in Eleanor's footsteps, and neither Harry Truman nor Dwight Eisenhower made special efforts to cultivate positive stories about their families.

Kennedy, however, apparently believed that he could make a constructive statement about himself and his character by allowing Avedon into his private life. The photographs would encourage people to think of him as a reliable family man who had not the slightest qualms about becoming president. (And one may ask: given Kennedy's history of womanizing, was this also a way to insulate himself from public speculation?) At a time when millions of Americans and people all over the world were worried about the threat of a nuclear war, the image of a young family looking ahead to a bright future was meant to send a reassuring message. Kennedy would strike similar notes in his inaugural address, emphasizing that, although America would "never negotiate out of fear," it would "never fear to negotiate."

The photographs, from two sessions on January 3, 1961, were intended for February issues of Harper's Bazaar and Look. All told, 17 Avedon photos were published in the two magazines. A selection would also be released to the Associated Press. But Avedon took hundreds of pictures in the course of that January day, and most of the ones on these pages are being published for the first time. As Shannon Thomas Perich recounts in The Kennedys: Portraits of a Family, the sessions took place at the Mediterranean-style oceanfront villa in Palm Beach, Florida, where the Kennedys had just spent Christmas and New Year's. Jacqueline was still convalescing after the birth of John junior, who had been delivered by Cesarean section on November 25. Between rounds of golf, President-Elect Kennedy was continuing to put together his Cabinet and plan his inauguration. There was also pressing news to absorb: on the same day as Avedon's session in Palm Beach, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Castro's Cuba, which loomed as an increasingly troublesome foreign-policy problem. Avedon would tell a writer for Newsweek in an interview shortly after the photographs were published, "When I took Caroline's picture with her father, he was dictating memos to his secretary. When I'd ask him to look around, he'd stop dictating. But the moment I finished, he'd start in where he left off."

Unfortunately, many details about the actual photo shoots are lost and no longer accessible. Harper's Bazaar did not keep a relevant archive, and correspondence about the assignment does not appear in the archived files of Look, which folded in 1971. Of the members of the Kennedy family photographed by Avedon that day, Caroline alone is still alive, but she was only a child at the time. Avedon himself died in 2004, leaving very little record of this pre-inauguration encounter. We know that Avedon arrived at the Palm Beach estate in the morning with his assistants. Also on the scene were Kenneth Battelle, the New York hairstylist, and a fitter from Oleg Cassini, who brought down the dresses, still unfinished, that Jackie would be wearing to the inaugural events. Aides and secretaries bustled everywhere. The weather was balmy.

The most important testimony is that embodied in the images themselves. They tell the story of an American family—warm, close, confident—about to embrace a remarkable destiny for which it is fully prepared. John F. Kennedy was a prince who had been schooled from early in life to become a king. In Avedon's photos there are no gilded crowns or ermine robes, but there is a palpable sense of his subjects as a natural aristocracy, and of Jack and Jackie as deeply human but also above and apart. The words of Robert Frost would complement the message that Avedon's photos convey. In a poem titled "Dedication," which he wrote for the inauguration, Frost proclaimed "the glory of a next Augustan age."

Presidential historian Robert Dallek is a professor at Boston University.